This study uses Miles and Snow’s 1978 and 2003 organizational strategy typology to
examine whether companies that follow different business strategies exhibit differences in
the occurrence of financial reporting irregularities and whether firms’ business strategies
are a factor in determining the audit effort necessary to attest to the firms’ financial statements.
By exploring the extent to which firms following particular business strategies are
more likely to experience financial reporting irregularities, we provide evidence that
increases our understanding of the underlying determinants of financial reporting quality.
By examining the relation between business strategy and audit effort, we also provide evidence
on the extent to which audit firms appear to incorporate business strategy in developing
their audit planning. We develop a measure of business strategy based on Miles and
Snow 1978 and 2003 and test the association between this business strategy measure and
several proxies for financial reporting irregularities as well as its contribution to an audit
fee model generated from prior literature.
Investigating the extent to which firms that follow particular business strategies are more
likely to experience financial reporting irregularities is consistent with a call for research in
Zahra, Priem, and Rasheed 2005 (813) who suggest that “accounting research, by and large,
has focused on identifying potential indicators or ‘red flags’ rather than establishing direct
causes or antecedents [of misreporting]”. We discuss the business risks of certain business
strategies in the context of SAS No. 99 (American Institute of Certified Public Accountants
[AICPA] 2002) in order to describe how business strategy may be an underlying determinant
of both the occurrence of financial reporting irregularities and additional effort by auditors
in the attestation of financial statements.